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Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

theatlantic.com

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Re: Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

#21

Post by dspeyer »

illuminate wrote: post #11
mseebach wrote: post #6

Aren't good PR people supposed to "sell" their story directly to a "journalist", without an intermediate publicly available press release? Will this tool find those? Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR.

"Aren't good PR people supposed to "sell" their story directly to a "journalist", without an intermediate publicly available press release?" That would require that the "journalist" pay attention and not just directly look through their pile of releases for a "story". News departments are lazy and don't want to pay for real news, they want it spoon-fed.

No, it just requires the PR person to send the press release to the journalist without posting it publicly.

Re: Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

#22

Post by mseebach »

untog wrote: post #16
mseebach wrote: post #6

Aren't good PR people supposed to "sell" their story directly to a "journalist", without an intermediate publicly available press release? Will this tool find those? Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR.

Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR. Well, the Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit organisation, so it's certainly not quite the same as the article is describing.

Parroting PR from non-profits is no better than parroting PR from corporations. In neither case is "journalism" going on.

It is of course possible that the reporter in question has followed this topic closely for years and therefore has sources that told her about this service - conveniently timed so she can lead the piece with "Today the Sunlight Foundation unveils Churnalism".

Re: Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

#23

Post by erdogan »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #5

It may seem like a minor nitpick, but the main Churnalism site[1] touts the byline "Discover the journalism you can trust and what you should question." The purpose of this tool is definitely a step in the right direction, but just because a given piece probably isn't a recycled press release doesn't mean you should stop looking at it with a healthy dose of skepticism. [1] http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/

Agreed. Also, this tool seems to be more about raising questions about context rather than a litmus test for plagiarism. As the author wrote, "Although such quotations are not examples of churnalism per se, Devine says that that information will be helpful to readers too, showing them the context a quote appeared in, and giving them the chance to think about why a reporter selected a particular passage from all of the others."

Re: Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

#24

Post by ignostic »

This is really awesome. It's definitely a step in the right direction, anyway.

If the tool really catches on, though, there's an easy loophole that spammers have been using to trick Google for the last ten years. You simply load the content into a "spinner" and have it generate synonyms. Articles for human consumption used to require manual editing, but the programs are getting better.

Spammers have been known to use a similar trick to re-use company "news" by sending journalists re-written releases as "exclusives."

This is why real journalists call, verify, and investigate. Publications like the NYT or WSJ are never fooled by the tricks above, though they may use some AP or PR copy to save time.

Re: Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

dspeyer wrote: post #21
illuminate wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Aren't good PR people supposed to "sell" their story directly to a "journalist", without an intermediate publicly available press release?" That would require that the "journalist" pay attention and not just directly look through their pile of releases for a "story". News departments are lazy and don't want to pay for real news, they want it spoon-fed.

No, it just requires the PR person to send the press release to the journalist without posting it publicly.

The point is (at least in terms of detecting submarines), that they send the same press release to many different "journalists", making it easy to cross-correlate different stories to see that they all are based on the same internal document.

Re: Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

#29

Post by danso »

A cool app, but a sad statement about the state of journalism that PR fluff is as easy to spot as seeing quotes come verbatim from previously published PR pieces. The more insidious PR can come from spoon-fed "exclusive" interviews and not be as easily detected by this process.

Even better would be something that produced a dossier of organizations and spokespeople...so that you can easily see the potential connections behind any quoted source (of course, there will be false positives) In news stories, someone's role as a shill can be papered over by calling them a: "industry expert" or "author" or "researcher/analyst"

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